For everyone who follows me, you know full well that my first week in April was all about the TOPO Summit. I also promised that I would go back to regularly scheduled programming, but something happened that was really cool…people created some amazing content from the Summit.

Regardless of the fact these content pieces related to Summit, there was incredible creativity and a focus on high value. In other words, if it wasn’t about TOPO, I’d still be impressed. And as importantly, if you didn’t go to the conference, you would still get incredible value from the content.

Greatness! Check it out below:

The video

I have to start with the video…it’s awesome. As you will see throughout this blog post – TalkDesk’s follow-up content was amazing:

Here at Infer, we eat our own dog food when it comes to demand generation and sales development, and we believe in sharing successes in order to contribute to the growing community of forward-looking predictive practitioners. Here are three of our own use cases that we hope other sales development teams can leverage: [Read more…]

As marketers, one question we always ask ourselves is “How do we expand our reach?” For years we’ve struggled to cast a wide net to as many people as possible to pour leads into the top of the funnel. Now – it’s time to flip that funnel on its head. [Read more…]

With marketing now playing a more strategic role in organizations as they seek to align closer to their buyers, there seems to be this notion that sales has now become less important and that marketing is now poised to unseat sales as the preeminent department. [Read more…]

Here’s a plain and simple truth: the best sales development teams today leverage technology to perform smarter, better and faster. The proliferation of, and advances in, sales technology have presented today’s sales development teams with an opportunity to completely revolutionize the way they conduct business. [Read more…]

One of the biggest trends in b2b sales and marketing is the transition from inbound marketing only (wide net) to outbound sales and marketing (tight targeting). This trend has resulted in a sharp increase in outbound sales development. Outbound sales development is working but imagine if marketing and the entire organization supported these targeted efforts. That is Account Based Marketing (ABM). Here is an opportunity to learn more. The video below is from an eCornell video panel on Account Based Marketing with myself, Jon Miller (Founder of Engagio) and Maria Pergolino (VP of Marketing from Apttus). I think that it turned out great. I hope you enjoy.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic and a co-founder of Topo. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

The Funnelholic is content marketing themed again this week. We have an amazing webinar, 3 Steps to Creating Content that Converts Like Crazy, with Cosmo Mariano from GetLift and Jason Miller from LinkedIn on September 24, 2014 10AM Pacific Standard Time. Whenever we have an event like this, my mind starts going…in this case, one of my favorite topics — content marketing.

Back to business — one of my favorite pieces on content is the case story aka the case study aka the use case. It is the most powerful opportunity for content marketers that is often wasted aka B-O-R-I-N-G. Marketers, even the best content marketers, produce the boringest case studies ever. So, with that, I thought I would share one of my favorite case studies from one of my favorite content marketers, Neil Patel, entitled: How I Used SEO to Drive to 5 Million Visitors to Gawker Media. It’s awesome so read it – -and in the meantime, I highlight some of my favorite things about it below:

Deliver an Arresting Headline

Oh yeah, not just an arresting headline, but a killer graphical representation too. I loved what I saw the minute I opened this page. [Read more…]

Today’s guest post is from Cosmo Mariano from GetLift. Cosmo is a demand-gen, content marketing strategist and almost as importantly, Cosmo and Jason Miller from LinkedIn will be speaking on an amazing Funnelholic webinar on content marketing: 3 Steps to Creating Content that Converts Like Crazy. — Join us on September 24, 2014 10AM Pacific Standard Time. [Read more…]

At Compile, like most companies these days, we prefer an open office where engineering, sales and operations sit side-by-side. As a result, I am now spending a lot of time with developers (they will helpfully point out that this keeps me grounded in reality!).

In some ways it’s the classic yin and yang: methodical programmer versus instinctive marketer. But moving beyond the stereotypes, it seems to me that sales and marketing has evolved from a “gut-driven” discipline to a more “data-driven” science.

Whether it’s A/B testing your outreach, measuring lead conversion or tracking prospects, everything we do can be tracked and measured. So even though I’ll not admit it in front of the developers, there’s a lot we can learn from engineering. For instance, the concept of GIGO or garbage in, garbage out. This is a central tenant in computer science which says that a machine is only as good as the data you put in — the smartest computer will spit out nonsensical output if you feed it nonsensical input.

It’s the same with your sales pipeline. Your organization may have a great sales machine and well-defined processes, but if you feed your team bad leads, your conversions will be low. Besides losing revenue by tying up your sales team, poor leads demotivate even the most efficient and dedicated reps. And no amount of process or people optimization can undo the damage of a bad lead.